There's one more thing we need to talk about regarding curriculum design before you start reorganizing yours...

Did you know that you need to consider your class schedule before you reorganize your curriculum?

If you don't, it can have serious repercussions on your ability to add students and grow your dojo.

I made this mistake early on in my career as a martial art school owner. Not giving a single thought to how I'd divide my classes up once I had more than a 18 or so students in a given class, I created my curriculum on the fly.

This ended up giving me some serious headaches later when I had to start dividing my students up into subgroups in order to add more classes.

At first it was no big deal - when you only have 40 or 50 students in your school, that means you probably only have about a dozen students in each class. A dozen adults, a dozen kids in the beginner's class, a dozen or so in the "advanced" class, and a dozen or so in your fitness kickboxing, tiny tots, or other programs.

But what happens when you really start figuring out your marketing, and you add 60 or 70 students in just a few months, with the majority of those students going into your kid's beginner classes?

If you haven't planned ahead and worked contingencies into your curriculum and schedule for your school's growth, you're going to run into some major issues regarding where you're going to put all those students. 

For many school owners, this ends up becoming a serious customer service and retention issue. For example, years ago in my private coaching group, I ran an enrollment contest among the members. One member in particular did everything I told him to do - and I mean everything.

As it turned out, he enrolled 100 students over a four-month period. I know what you're probably thinking: "Wow Mike, if I could do that, all my problems would be solved!"

WRONG!

Unfortunately, this client didn't pay attention to what came next, and he had no idea how to keep those new students around. And a few months later, he'd only retained 40 of those 100 students.

A lot of his issues with retaining those students had to do with scheduling and how he'd split up his classes and curriculum. He simply had no place to put all those students, so his beginner classes were bursting at the seams and he had no way to give all those new students the individual attention they needed.

Moreover, his intermediate and advanced students got shuffled around to "make room" for all the new students coming in, leaving them feeling neglected and relegated to the back seat. As you can imagine, he lost a few of those students as well.

The moral of the story is that you need to plan ahead for your school's growth when you are planning out your curriculum. Decide early on how to divide your curriculum and classes up so that you have plenty of room to add students once you get your marketing machine running on all 8 cylinders.

If you plan to focus on kid's classes, one way to do this is to plan for an early/late schedule, which I describe in Small Dojo Big Profits. There are other considerations as well. 

For example, if you plan to focus on adult students and classes you'll need to keep your "prime time" hours open to allow for more adult classes to accommodate adding adult students as you grow. 

And, if you have just a single training floor, you'll need to decide which market you're going to focus on, because focusing on one will preclude adding a lot of students to the other program. 

(Note: It also helps to know how many students you can safely and reasonably accommodate in a single class. This number will be different for kids and for adults. Figure this out early on.)

Obviously, curriculum design has a huge impact on all this, because you have to know how you're going to divide your students up before you can plan for scheduling all those classes.

So, before you ever start planning your curriculum, make sure you take scheduling for your school's growth into account. By doing so, you'll save yourself a ton of headaches later on, and you'll also ensure that you're able to retain the majority of students that you might enroll during a sudden growth spurt.